Building Your Case for Cutting-Edge AI and Analytics in Five Easy Steps

As the amount of data generated by companies exponentially increases each year, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, and machine learning is becoming less of an option and more of a necessity for those in the eDiscovery industry. However, some organizations and law firms are still reluctant to utilize more advanced AI technology. There are different reasons for the reluctance to embrace AI, including fear of the learning curve, uncertainty around cost, and unknown return on investment. But where this is uncertainty, there is often great opportunity. Adopting AI provides an excellent opportunity for ambitious legal professionals to act as the catalysts for revitalizing their organization’s or law firm’s outdated eDiscovery model. Below, I’ve outlined a simple, five-step process that can help you build a business case for bringing on cutting-edge AI solutions to reduce cost, lower risk, and improve win rates for both organizations and law firms.

Step 1: Find the Right Test Case

You will want to choose the best possible test case that highlights all the advantages that newer, cutting-edge AI solutions can provide to your eDiscovery program.

One of the benefits of newer solutions is that they can be utilized in a much wider variety of cases than older tools. However, when developing a business case to convince reluctant stakeholders – bigger is better. If possible, select a case with a large volume of data. This will enable you to show how effectively your preferred AI solution can cull large volumes of data quickly compared to your current tools and workflows.

Also try to select a case with multiple review issues, like privilege, confidentiality, and protected health information(PHI)/personally identifiable information (PII) concerns. Newer tools hitting the market today have a much higher degree of efficiency and accuracy because they are able to run multiple algorithms and search within metadata. This means they are much better at quickly and correctly identifying types of information that would need be withheld or redacted than older AI models that only use a single algorithm to search text alone.

Finally, if possible, choose a case that has some connection to, or overlap with, older cases in your (or your client’s) legal portfolio. For a law firm, this means selecting a case where you have access to older, previously reviewed data from the same client (preferably in the same realm of litigation). For a corporation, this just means choosing a case, if possible, that shares a common legal nexus, or overlapping data/custodians with past matters. This way, you can leverage the ability that new technology has to re-use and analyze past attorney work product on previously collected data.

Step 2: Aggregate the Data

Once you’ve selected the best test case, as well as any previous matters from which you want to analyze data, the AI solution vendor will collect the respective data and aggregate it into a big data environment. A quality vendor should be able to aggregate all data, prior coding, and other key information, including text and metadata into a single database, even if the previously reviewed data was hosted by different providers in different databases and reviewed by different counsel.

Step 3: Analyze the Data

Once all data is aggregated, it’s time for the fun to begin. Cutting-edge AI and machine learning will analyze all prior attorney decisions from previous data, along with metadata and text features found within all the data. Using this data analysis, it can then identify key trends and provide a holistic view of the data you are analyzing. This type of powerful technology is completely new to the eDiscovery field and something that will certainly catch the eye of your organization or your clients.

Step 4: Showcase the Analytical Results

Once the data has been analyzed, it’s time to showcase the results to key decision makers, whether that is your clients, partners, or in-house eDiscovery stakeholders. Create a presentation that drills down to the most compelling results, and clearly illustrates how the tool will create efficiency, lower costs, and mitigate risk, such as:

• Large numbers of identical documents that had been previously collected, reviewed, and coded non-responsive multiple times across multiple matters
• Large percentages of identical documents picked up by your privilege screen (and thus, thrust into costly privilege re-review) that have actually never been coded privilege in any matter
• Large numbers of identical documents that were previously tagged as containing privilege or PII information in past matters (thus eliminating the need for review for those issues in the current test case).
• Large percentages of documents that have been re-collected and re-reviewed across many matters

Step 5: Present the Cost Reduction

Your closing argument should always focus on the bottom line: how much money will this tool be able to save your firm, client, or company? This should be as easy as taking the compelling analytical results above and calculating their monetary value:

• What is the monetary difference between conducting a privilege review in your test case using your traditional privilege screen vs. re-using privilege coding and redactions from previous matters?
• What is the monetary difference between conducting an extensive search for PII or PHI in your test case, vs. re-using the PII/PHI coding and redactions from previous matters?
• How much money would you save by cutting out a large percent of manual review in the test case due to culling non-responsive documents identified by the tool?
• How much money would you save by eliminating a large percentage of privilege “false positives” that the tool identified by analyzing previous attorney work product?
• How much money will you (or your client) save in the future if able to continue to re-use attorney work product, case after case?

In the end, if you’ve selected the right AI solution, there will be no question that bringing on best-of-breed AI technology will result in a better, more streamlined, and more cost-effective eDiscovery program.